For news sites that would like to experiment with topic pages, the folks at the Knight Digital Media Center have created a straightforward tool set that uses a modified WordPress theme.
This approach can get you started quickly and easily, generating a topic page with a stable URL that’s easy to find for users and search engines alike. And more than automatic content curation (which you can get with tags or categories), this topic page tool enables you to customize the page with a unique topic summary, custom banner and blogrolls. The banner (which could be anything, including a targeted ad) and blogrolls carry over to each story associated with that topic.
KDMC has an online tutorial to help create a topic site based on the Cutline theme, although it can be used with other themes. The tutorial, “Building a Topics System,” covers required plug-ins, and, if you’re familiar with PHP, there’s an additional tutorial on “Theme Modifications.”
The toolkit can be used to create a topical site parallel to your main site. This could be useful if you want to test out topic pages while your technical team explores building this functionality into your CMS. Or it could enable a small, topic-based site to launch from scratch.
The WordPress plug-in could be a great way for hyperlocal sites to create topic verticals for their community. Here’s a recent example of a topic page on California’s education budget crisis by Oakland North, a hyperlocal news project managed by the J-school at the University of California, Berkeley. The page combines news stories with background time lines, maps, multimedia and charts.
KDMC developed the topic tool kit in late 2009 to help spread the word to its multimedia trainees about the benefits of the topic sections (including a list of 10 site using them). I was able to test drive it during a recent Web 2.0 training at the center, so I can attest to its ease of use and functionality — it took me just a few minutes to build a simple demo topics page.
KDMC is continuing to refine its topics tools and is already thinking about how they could be adapted for publishing platforms like the iPad, so keep an eye out for improvements.
